Summer in the City, a new event from the Downtown Everett Association (DEA), ran until 8pm on Friday and Saturday. The event is the evolution of Salty Sea Days, a two-day summer block party. Schack Art Center's Fresh Paint Festival, the city's best-known summer arts festival, opened Saturday morning, overlapping Summer in the City. The two events shared a weekend by design.

"We intentionally planned the events the same weekend," DEA Executive Director Liz Stenning said in an interview at Summer in the City. Stenning said the goal was to give visitors a reason to spend a full weekend downtown, moving between both events. Aaron Sheckler, Marketing & Communications Manager at Schack Art Center, said the partnership was "designed to get people to spend more time downtown and share everything that we have to offer."

Fresh Paint drew a steady, dense crowd throughout both days, filling the blocks around Schack's Colby Avenue storefront with over 100 artists showcasing their work, checkpoints for the Port of Everett's Float Find scavenger hunt, and a painted piano played by adults and children alike. All of Schack's studios were active with instructors. Multiple performances by The Dance School drew crowds and cheers.

The Dance School performed some of their weekend routines at Summer in the City, several blocks away. The crowd that cheered them on came mostly from people already present at the event. Float Find stations dotted the street, while rows of folding chairs sat empty in front of a stage where bands played to a scattered handful of people. At some booths, vendors sat quietly waiting for only a handful of visitors.

Many of the people we spoke to at Fresh Paint hadn't heard of Summer in the City at all. Several said they'd come downtown expecting only the art festival and were surprised to hear about an event just blocks away. Local business owners gave mixed accounts of the event, with some stating plainly: they never know about DEA events until no-parking signs go up on the sidewalks, while others said they hadn't noticed any real increase in foot traffic from Summer in the City. One business owner said DEA's street closures actively hurt them, cutting off potential customers who often drive and can't find parking.

Asked directly what evidence DEA has that Summer in the City benefits downtown's small businesses, Stenning pointed to Float Find, the glass-float scavenger hunt that lets participants check in at businesses and festival booths across downtown and the waterfront. But Float Find is a partnership between the Port of Everett and Schack Art Center, with the DEA only participating. The only public data point tied to the program, a reported 10 percent increase in visitors last year, was measured at the Port's Waterfront Place, not in the downtown core where Summer in the City operates.

DEA is a 501(c)(6) business association, funded through membership dues and sponsorships rather than as a general nonprofit, and its event page solicits paid sponsorships in exchange for a booth. On Saturday, the space inside the event's barricades was dominated by DEA's own booth, North Sound Media representatives, Funko's headquarters on one corner, and an inflatable stage and games. Roughly a dozen sponsor businesses ran their own promotional booths, mostly variations on spin-the-wheel games offering coupons or small prizes.

Salty Sea Days started in 1970 as a much bigger civic festival (boat races, a parade, a carnival, fireworks) and drew over 100,000 visitors a year at its peak. The city council cut its $70,000 annual subsidy in 2003, and the nonprofit that ran it disbanded. DEA revived the name in 2022 as a smaller two-day block party and ran it that way until last year. Summer in the City is DEA's second attempt to revitalize the event, this time with a new name.